The Gowrow: William Miller's Posse and the Searcy County Monster

The Ozarks of northwest Arkansas, at the end of the nineteenth century. A place of caves, rivers and long winter nights.

Sunday, 31 January 1897. Page 16 of the Arkansas Gazette carried a headline that would outlive everyone involved. "The Green Gowrow, Killed in Searcy County." The reporter was Elbert Smithee, son of J. N. Smithee, who had become the paper's editor the year before.

His source was William Miller, a Little Rock businessman travelling in the Ozarks. Miller described a "horrible monster" that had been killing livestock and pets around Blanco, in Calf Creek Township. St. Joe and Richland had been terrorized too. The locals said it came "stealing down from the mountains in the night and crying 'gowrow'". Its name, they said, came from that awful cry.

Miller found its lair. A cave "filled with skeletal remains," animal and human. The tracks were of "ponderous size." The cave mouth was "worn smooth as though by some massive weight's wonted passage."

He put together a posse. They waited. Then they heard it. The creature came out of a nearby lake, or a river, depending on who retells it, causing the earth to tremble as it made its way toward them. "The sickly green beast emerged from the river." "Miller took a snapshot with his Kodak and gave the order to fire." It took several volleys. "But he died hard." Its tail took down a tree and snicked off the leg of a former section hand from the Iron Mountain railroad.

Measured on the carcass, it was about 20 feet long. Short, thick legs. A row of short horns along its back. Large webbed feet ending in claws. A long, thin tail that "terminated in a bony sickle." And the head. "Its head was something like a man's, but it had tusks over its under lip."

Miller said he shipped the carcass to the Smithsonian Institution. It never arrived. The Kodak snapshot was never published. What survives is a drawing by the illustrator Elmer Burrus, who said it was "based on a photograph."

Fred W. Allsopp was at the Gazette at the time and later became its business manager and publisher. He did not hedge. "It was a great fake, probably without foundation in fact." He named Elbert Smithee as the man behind it. The folklorist William M. Clements places the gowrow in the frontier "folklore of exaggeration," stories sometimes told as true but usually understood as humorous lies. Commentators have since wondered whether a razorback hog or an alligator lay somewhere beneath the tale. No official investigation was ever recorded.

The gowrow did not die with the posse's volleys. The folklorist Vance Randolph collected stories he believed went back to the 1880s, and treated the gowrow as a whole species. Its young hatched from soft-shelled eggs "as large as beer kegs." A cave explorer met one in Devil's Hole, Boone County. A man from Mena said he caught one by feeding it dried apples until it swelled too big to get back into its burrow, then charged admission to see it. Randolph published the tales in We Always Lie to Strangers in 1951. In 2024 the creature returned on television, as the "Cave Dragon of Arkansas" in Lost Monster Files. More than a century on, a twenty foot green beast with a head something like a man's still stalks the Ozarks. At least on paper.